As I mentioned in the iPhone forum, with the help of the support team, I finally have my Windows Desktop, my Palm, and my iPhone nicely synching to each other. After managing to royally screw it up, it was nice to get it all working again.

My laptop is a Macbook Air, so that is the next piece of the puzzle. At some point I must have tried the demo of the Mac, because when I try to use it now, it says my trial version is expired. I read in another post in this forum about darwine, but know very little about it. On my previous Macbook, I did run Parallels and Windows, but really want to avoid that route again as I was never truly happy with it - and since the Air has no disc drive, installing my legal copies of Windows and Parallels might be a challenge anyway.

So, I was wondering about the reasoning for using darwine as opposed to the "true" mac version of the software. And, what the steps would be for installation - I did find "the source" for darwine installation, but haven't done that yet. I remember nothing of the trial version of Handbase for the Mac - must have been a long time ago! Any thoughts about the best choice to move forward. Or, can I not have two different desktop environments involved in synching.

Thanks for your post! Indeed we have a version that runs using the Wine engine, but it does so in such a way that you don't need to install Wine, Windows, or anything else. It's a self contained executable that installs all it needs.

If you purchase the Mac version of the desktop software, you get access to download it from our web site (a full version, not trial). When you log in to download that, there is also a choice to download the Wine enabled version if you'd prefer (you could also download and use both Mac and/or Wine versions so you can decide which you'd prefer).

I personally use the Mac version. While I can't design databases with it and it's missing some features, for day to day use of syncing, looking up and entering records, it still is preferable to me than the slower, bigger, more full featured, Wine enabled cousin. If there is something you need to do outside the capabilities of the Mac version then it's certainly worth a look!

One last thing, with all the versions and variations I own, is the purchase of the Mac version a full purchase or an upgrade or cross grade. I logged into my account, but didn't see an option other than full purchase since my desktop version is windows professional.

Don't know if you still need help with this one or not, but you may want to consider HanDBase Plus for iPhone / Mac if you are going to be doing much work on the Mac platform. The Plus addon gives you HanDBase Desktop AND the wifi conduit so you can easily sync your databases.

You can purchase this package for $9.99, the same as you could a standalone copy of HanDBase Desktop. To do this, follow these steps:

If I add an additional license - ie a Mac license for the iPhone add on - how is that different from purchasing the full Mac version. I get the obvious difference which is price, but what difference is there in the actual software which would be on the Macbook laptop.

Dave is committed to improving HanDBase Desktop for Mac, but honestly it is a very slow process with only one developer, a myriad of different platforms to maintain and time/resource constraints. At present, there aren't any revisions in the works as he is working on finishing up some iPad stuff, website stuff and then is going to revisit the Android version. I mention this because I don't want to get your hopes up for a really quick update... it will be some time away.